This invention relates to a technique for transmitting digital contents from a server via a network to a user terminal for selling the digital contents.
In recent years, copyrighted articles (copyrighted articles in text, music, art, graphics, movie, photo and so on) fixed to carriable media such as paper media of books, etc., and computer-readable media of CD-ROM, etc., and sold have been put into communicatable form as digital data form and sold through a computer network with the widespread use of computer networks typified by the Internet and improvement of the law infrastructure for regulating electronic commerce through the computer network. The copyrights of such copyrighted articles put into communicatable form as digital data form (which will be hereinafter referred to as digital contents) are easily violated because of the essential feature of digital data that the same articles can be copied completely. Therefore, to provide such digital contents, it is necessary to prevent replication exceeding the licensed range from the copyright holders; on the other hand, it is also necessary to guarantee use of the copyrighted articles by the user in the range. However, if too much importance is put on the copyright holder protection, an excessive burden (forcible disclosure of private information, purchase of unsatisfactory copyrighted article, etc.,) is imposed on the user and consequently the user may be disgusted with purchase of digital contents using the computer network. On the other hand, if too much importance is put on the user protection, room is left for the user to commit illegal use of copyrighted articles (illegal getting by circumventing charging, use exceeding the permitted number of times, use in unauthorized use mode, etc.,) and consequently selling copyrighted articles using the computer network may be circumvented. Therefore, to promote use of such a business model, it is important to bring copyright holder protection and user protection into balance.
By the way, in electronic commerce using the computer network, credit cards are often used as payment means, because to the credit card number of each credit card, the bank account and personal information of the owner of the credit card are related in the issuer of the credit card, namely, the credit card company, and purchase bill advance and collection by the credit card company using the information are guaranteed for the payment using the credit card. Specifically, if the user transmits the credit card number of his or her credit card and his or her personal information (for example, name) in combination to the server of the seller, then the seller transfers the received information to the server of the credit card company (credit sever) to inquire whether or not the combination is registered as a valid combination. Upon reception of an answer indicating that the combination is valid (which will be hereinafter referred to as credit), the seller authorizes the transaction with the user and if user requests purchase of a specific commodity, the seller sends (transmits) the commodity and requests the credit card company to pay for the commodity in advance. The credit card company pays the bill requested for payment in advance by the seller to the seller and requests the bank to pay the bill from the bank account corresponding to the credit card number. That is, the credit granted by the credit card company has the meaning of guaranteeing the credit granted to the user by the credit card company.
In the selling of digital contents using the computer network described above, it is necessary to show the contents of the copyrighted article to be sold for the user before purchase as in selling of books, photos, or pictures in an actual store; however, in doing so, the possibility that the copyrighted article will be illegally used cannot be denied. Therefore, if importance is placed on right protection of copyright holders, credit should be granted by the credit card company at the stage before the samples are shown.
However, the credit granting procedure is to send the personal information and credit card number of the user over the network as described above and thus if the user who does not yet decide to purchase a specific commodity is forced to send the personal information and credit card number of the user, it is too severe for the user.
On the other hand, if importance is placed on user protection and credit is granted at the stage where the whole digital contents are normally downloaded into the user terminal and processing required for placing the copyrighted article in a usable state, such as extraction, data arrangement, and print, is complete, the copyrighted article itself is passed to a person not granted credit because credit granting is incomplete (namely, unidentified person) and thus the possibility that the copyright will be violated is extremely high.